I loved it, they did show alot of it on the sportscenter spot they did on it over the weekend, but def some good stuff well worth the reserved spot on my DVR. Loved the fact that they all came out and openly said they wanted to compete against each other in practice to prove each was the best at their postions. Magic and Bird agreeing the torch had been passed to Jordan and John stockton walking around with is family in Barcelona and noone even knowing who he was.

Still the best line (and one featured in the Magic 30 for 30 ESPN special) was the photo opp with Jordan, Magic and Bird when the photog asks them to get closer and Magic says, "If we get any closer to Michael someone's gonna blow a whistle and call a foul".

If you were too young to have seen 1992, you have to apprecaite the whole context.

This was the first Olympics sinnce 88. It was the last Olympics before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was the Cold War at the end of Ronnie Raygun's presidency when he was pretty much bat shit senile and despite Perystroyka and Glasnost the itchey fingers were still at the trigger.

In 88,the US Olympic team led by David Robinson and Danny Manning didn't even make the gold medal game between the USSR & Yugoslavia. USA basketball was even losing in the hemisphere to the like of Oskar Schmidt. USA basketball had been so dominant over the decades except for the Munich screw job that the post 84 teams getting punked was shocking.

Buy 1990 we'd had enough. Pressure was put on the Olymic Comittee to stop the charade of the post-Soviet and communist charade and hypocracy of enlisting their professional athletes in thye military as a thinly veiled excuse for them to do nothing be practice and compete and professionals were allowed in the Olympics. Since the Wall fell in 1989 and Russia was a mess and the sattalites were going democratic, they had neither the will nor means to blcok that change.

And yeah Lee you cynical twat that mattered to Americans as much as Herbie Brooks bunch earlier in the decade.

You could sense the build up. This was OUR national sport. It was like the Germans losing wars or Ireland getting drunk under the table or someone with worse oral hygine than Brittain. We were PISSED as a nation.

Everyone in the NBA wanted in. Everyone.

This was far less about their practices or the internal competition, although that was awsome. That roster was unreal, obviously. But it was about bringing in a John Stockton, Chris Mullen and Clyde Drexler on the 3rd rotation to just punk the crud out of those commies who were now Balkanized (pun intended).

Russia couldn't even get to the fianls. Croatia had to satisfy our patriotic blood lust, and AFAIC, that was a damn shame.

There you have it, straight out of JB's mouth, Ronnie Reagon and The Dream Team worked together to end the USSR...

And none of you twats watched the redeem team, so blow me. It was, from a pure sport perspective the same thing. None of the outside stuff, but we once again were losing our sport and took it back (and will continue to as long as we have someone running a real program).

Jordan, Barkley, and Magic covering their Reebok logos with the US flag because they were Nike guys is what I remember most. Didn't appreciate that much. The games felt like the varsity pouring on second-half points vs. the JV. Not too compelling.

Thanks for that tip eye, I'll be sure to check it out. JB is spot on with the basketball analysis and I'll defer the politics talk. But the fall of the Soviet Union happened a few months back, before the Winter Olympics and they were called the Unified Team, not the Soviet Union, it lost a lot of its luster from just the name change alone. Then add the fact that many of the better USSR were from Lithuania, who competed separately from the Unified Team, which the US crushed in the semis and you could say the big, bad, US bullied the brand new country who barely had its own government set up.

Nevertheless, a unified Soviet Union or Yugoslavia (Vlade briefly speculates if he and his Serb teammates were the missing link in his 30:30) would have been crushed and the actual basketball was obviously not compelling- if you took out the politics and recent Olympic history. It was the biggest slam dunk gold medal in the history of the Olympics- Summer or Winter. The rest of the world's best caught up to our C and D teams and we smack them back down for about a decade. It was like setting NBA Live on rookie difficulty. JMO.

While the world in general was not near as competitive with us as it has been since (particularly since mid 2000s) what our best did to their best individually was ridiculous. What I remember most was how Jordan embarrassed Marcilonis from Lithuania. Not too mention the fact that the Dream Team didn't have the real Magic or real Bird.

Criminals in this town used to believe in things...honor, respect."I heard your dog is sick, so bought you this shovel"

OK, sports forum - I apologize to the far righties who think Ronnie belongs on Rushmore (although ironically he could never win the GOP primary process as he violated Norquest's pledge & he was a social moderate, but I digress).

The point that elude the prickly one is that America was still very polarazied in the Cold War when the 88 team went down in a punkish manner, and we were up for an ass kicking.

Squints wrote:Thanks for that tip eye, I'll be sure to check it out. JB is spot on with the basketball analysis and I'll defer the politics talk. But the fall of the Soviet Union happened a few months back, before the Winter Olympics and they were called the Unified Team, not the Soviet Union, it lost a lot of its luster from just the name change alone. Then add the fact that many of the better USSR were from Lithuania, who competed separately from the Unified Team, which the US crushed in the semis and you could say the big, bad, US bullied the brand new country who barely had its own government set up.

Agree. The build up didn't match the show up of the rooskies. But the dream team was all about the build up IMO.

jb wrote:Agree. The build up didn't match the show up of the rooskies. But the dream team was all about the build up IMO.

Don't get me wrong, as a 15 year old I pretty much had SD's take. I was into it from the Tournament of the Americas through the gold medal game, but after the first two prelim games I lost that hard core interest because it was just non-competitive. I remember in one of the games there were three dream teamers around the basket, opponents just watching them, and they passed the basketball to each other because no one wanted to score. Like playing Madden on rookie level.

My take now is admittedly in hind-sight with 20 years of reflection and you are right about the build-up being greater. I have the dvr set on NBA TV for 1030 tonight.

and it came in the form of Toni Kukoc of Croatia, who had been offered a multimillion dollar contract by the Chicago Bulls at a time when they were refusing to renegotiate the contract of Pippen, who was earning a relatively paltry $770,000.

In a story that has become famous in the years since, Jordan followed up Daly's pregame speech by telling the rest of the locker room that he and Pippen would be the only ones defending Kukoc that day. They held him to four points on 2-for-11 shooting with seven turnovers in a 33-point victory before beating the Croatians again, by 32, in the gold-medal game.

I don't need to be patient, they're going to be shit forever. - CDT, discussing my favorite NFL team

Its from a German website, but just scroll to the bottom and click play!

“Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existance is defined in terms of control.”